President Eisenhower likes to scoff at last fall's uproar over Sputnik as the "Sputnik attitude"a period of frenzy that the U.S. would do well not to repeat. But Texas Democrat George H. Mahon, hard-working chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, warned his colleagues last week that the Sputnik attitude has vanished too fast for the nation's good.
When Russia sent the first man-made earth satellite into orbit last October, said Mahon during debate on the $38 billion defense appropriation, "we became aroused, humiliated, angry, frustrated and determined. Now the anger has cooled and the determination has been blunted." From...